


Aliases

by lionessvalenti



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Undercover as a Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 11:27:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/pseuds/lionessvalenti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan and Sherlock navigate a party as a married couple to find a blackmailer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aliases

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skieswideopen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skieswideopen/gifts).



A hand came out of nowhere slid across the small of Joan's back, coming to rest on her hip. Sherlock pressed a kiss to her temple. "You look ravishing," he mumbled.

Joan looked up at him, unimpressed. "You're late and you're interrupting my conversation."

Sherlock seemed surprised, as if he were only just now seeing the gentleman standing in front of Joan. "Oh, of course. My apologies." He held out his hand. "Sherlock Holmes. From the London office. I see you've met my darling wife."

"Michael Fiske," the man replied, shaking his hand. "Your wife is an impressive woman. She was telling me about her work in China and Bangladesh."

"Was she, now?" Sherlock raised an eyebrow at Joan. She smiled.

"You know how much my work with Doctors Without Borders means to me," she said pointedly. "I was telling Mr. Fiske here about my upcoming trip to Cambodia."

"She's quite the world traveler," Sherlock said. "Excuse us, Mr. Fiske, I'd like to have a moment with my wife." He tightened his grip around Joan's waist and lead her into an empty corner of the room. He let go of her and moved so they were face to face. "Doctors Without Borders?"

Joan shrugged. "I hated the idea of fake Joan being a housewife after she moved to London, and you the one who said the details were important. She's a doctor, so why wouldn't she work with a fantastic organization like Doctors Without Borders? It's not like she has anything else to do while you're at the office all day."

Sherlock stared at her for a moment. "I'm not going to get into a domestic dispute with you over the content of our alias' back story. What do you think of Fiske?"

"I don't think he's the guy. I don't think any of the people I've spoken to are our guy. All of them seem a lot more preoccupied with touching my arm while their wives aren't watching than keeping tabs on Devlin. Our blackmailer probably has other things on his mind."

"My thoughts exactly."

"Where _were_ you?" Joan asked. "If married woman shows up at a party full of businessmen without her husband, it will automatically lead at least half of them to assume that she's a lonely housewife who wants to sleep with them. I've talked to five men since I've been here and they've all hit on me. That's why I've only talked with men at this party, and I haven't had to start any of the conversations."

"And that's why you went with the Doctors Without Borders story. So they would know you kept yourself busy."

"Where were you?" she asked again, this time flatter and more forceful.

"I was upstairs," Sherlock replied. "If we're going to go to the crude lengths of undercover work, I can go to the crude lengths of rifling around through Devlin's home office to see what he's not telling us."

Joan held back a sigh. She knew Sherlock hadn't been happy to take on this case, but ever since Mycroft left, Sherlock had felt obligated to take on more cases that paid. Or any cases that paid. He had assumed that the case of Peter Devlin's blackmail had would take mere minutes to solve, but it turned out to be more complicated than they had originally anticipated. And now they were at a fancy dinner party in a Connecticut manor with every person Devlin suspected of being his blackmailer.

"Discretion," Devlin had said repeatedly during their consultation. "I can't have detectives interrogating my guests."

While Sherlock was content to lie to anyone to get behind a door or speak to someone in particular, it turned out he didn't like planned undercover work. Joan didn't mind until they reached the point of discussing exactly what they would be going undercover _as_ Husband and wife, sadly, had turned out to be the most likely of aliases, as suggested by their client. The simplicity of it was too brilliant to pass up. He even supplied back stories for them, or at least for Sherlock, as an executive in their London office. Joan didn't have anything by way of an alias after "wife".

It was Sherlock who began filling in the blank spaces in Joan's history. "The easiest way to keep a cover is for it be as close to your own history as possible," he'd said when they were still in New York. So, fake Joan was a surgeon who retired when she married Sherlock, and moved to London. He was the one who insisted to the client that Joan would keep her own surname, even an alternate version of herself. They had both agreed that "Joan Holmes" was a terrible name.

Doctors Without Borders had come later. Of course Sherlock had been right and Joan needed to pad her story when men began hitting on her. Besides, without Sherlock there, she was just a woman at a party wearing a fake wedding ring. She had to talk about _something_ , and Doctors Without Borders was something she had thought about a lot when she was younger. It fit.

"Did you find anything?" Joan asked.

"Only that Devlin lied to us about what he was being blackmailed over," Sherlock replied. He reached into his black jacket and pulled out a sheet of paper.

"What, sleeping with prostitutes wasn't bad enough?"

"He'd like us to think it was that simple. Not to say that he's not _also_ sleeping with prostitutes, not with the way his wife pulls away every time he touches her, but that's not what he wants to keep quiet."

Joan took the page and scanned it quickly. "That's a lot of money to suddenly go missing, but how do you know that this is what the blackmail is about?"

"Because of this." Sherlock pulled another paper from inside his jacket and handed it to her.

"And this is the real first note," Joan said. It was practically word for word from the note Devlin had given them, but with key words changed to suit the story he'd provided. She handed both papers back to him, as she didn't have any place to put it in her floor-length red dress or tiny clutch purse. "What's the next step? Talk to Devlin? He's the only one here who knows we're detectives, so he's going to be the most difficult."

Sherlock shook his head. "The objective remains the same. Find the blackmailer. Once we know who it is, everything else will come clean. And this time, we'll do it together."

"As we should have from the start," Joan said. "Since we're married."

Sherlock smiled, somewhere between a smirk and an actual show of affection. He held his arm out to Joan, and she took it. They began to walk through the crowded great room. "Oh, Watson?"

"Yes?"

He lifted his chin and didn't look quite at her. "You do look quite nice."

She smiled. "Thank you, Sherlock. So do you. I couldn't imagine a better person to be married to for an evening."

This time his smile was nothing but genuine. "Neither could I."


End file.
